The invention relates to monitoring call traffic associated with public switched telephone networks. In particular, the invention relates to monitoring and collecting call detail records that satisfy specified filter criteria.
There is tremendous business value associated with monitoring the call traffic associated with public switched telephone networks (PSTN). For example, having knowledge of who called whom, and for how long, may be of tremendous benefit to PSTN designers who are trying to maximize the return on capital investments in the PSTN or reduce quality of service issues in a particular geography. Similarly, marketers may be interested in identifying target markets, for new products or services based on the calling patterns of an individual. With the advent of deregulation in the telecommunications industry, accurate measures of call volumes traversing competing PSTN networks can have immediate and substantial financial effects on reciprocal compensation which typically flows between incumbent local exchange carriers and competitive local exchange carriers.
The monitoring of call traffic associated with a PSTN is typically achieved by collecting call detail records (CDRs). A single CDR contains some or all information known about a particular phone call, such as who called whom, when, for how long, etc. CDRs also may contain more technical information such as what route a call took through a PSTN network.
An inherent problem with filtering CDRs is maintaining the context under which a CDR was collected. For example, in the case of a single CDR filtering paradigm, suppose a filter criteria was specified that would limit CDR collection to all calls to or from a particular residential phone number. In the course of a day, only a few CDRs would be generated. Next, suppose a CDR processing application is run against this data and the nature of the CDR processing application is to determine how busy (volume of phone calls) the PSTN network is. In this example, the CDR processing application would conclude that the PSTN network is not busy at all, only a few calls occurred on the entire network. The reality is however that the CDR processing application did not understand the context under which the CDR data was collected, and derived incorrect conclusions as a result. This problem becomes more complex in the case of multiple, concurrent filter paradigms because the colleted set of CDRs is actually the union of smaller sets of CDRs, each smaller set being associated with a particular filter criteria. In this case, a CDR processing application must understand which, of several possible contexts, are associated with each individual CDR.
This invention is directed to a configuration tracking system for a call detail record (CDR) filtering system. Filter criteria for multiple filters are recorded in a dynamically changing Filter Table. The configuration tracking system maintains a Study Table, which is a historical record of the filter criteria in the dynamically changing Filter Table. The configuration tracking system updates the Study Table by detecting changes in the Filter Table, comparing earlier and later versions of the Filter Table, and, in response, opening and/or closing timestamped records in the Study Table.
Various embodiments of the present invention are capable of keeping track of the contexts under which CDRs are collected and filtered in a multiple concurrent filtering paradigm Other features and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and the detailed description that follows.